When it comes to social media, there’s one question companies continue to ask: What’s the ROI?

Despite social media gurus’ insistence that this venue isn’t about the return on investment — it’s about connections; it should be a given that companies use social media — it’s hard to imagine those arguments fully appease CEOs, CFOs and pretty much any other c-level exec.

There are many online resources to track social media statistics, but top social media sites now are getting in the game themselves. These sites’ built-in features make monitoring stats easy for even the most basic user.

Twitter recently started offering its new feature, Analytics, to select users, Mashable has reported. So far, no information has been released about a date for rolling it out further.

Twitter Analytics features colorful graphs illustrating things such as mentions, follows and unfollows and provides a grading system of sorts for individual tweets.

The information is much like that of its Facebook counterpart, Insights, which monitors things like user activity and demographics and provides data on the status updates, links and other things you post to your page.

Even though I haven’t used Insights extensively, it is nice to see the “impressions” information conveniently at the bottom of each of my page’s wall posts. Impressions is one of the newer aspects of Insights, a feature Facebook seems to continually improve. Twitter likely will tweak and update Analytics after its launch, as well.

One potential change Twitter might enact in the long-term is charging for Analytics, Mashable CEO Pete Cashmore theorized in a blog post.

So far, it’s been presumed the feature — like most everything on the site — will be free, and Twitter has not released any information to the contrary. Analytics would be a good opportunity for Twitter to start making money, Cashmore pointed out, but keeping the feature free would continue to drive users to Twitter.com instead of third-party apps and other social media monitoring services.

Then there’s the question of whether Analytics will take anything away from those monitoring services, many of which charge — at least for certain levels of service.

Will some of those web-based services fade away in the coming months and years? Most likely, yes. But that’s only to be expected, as there’s currently many services available and no evident top dog.

Just as the web produced many social media sites over the past 10 years that have since faded away — Friendster, anyone? — while Facebook and a handful of others emerged as the sites to use, the choices in analytics-monitoring sites likely will be condensed, as well.

But those companies that offer a true consulting service should still have an advantage over Twitter Analytics and the like.

While those web services provide basic data on the popularity of certain tweets or Facebook posts and how many users repost or respond to them, they still don’t give a company any intelligent insight. Many companies using social media are trying to target a certain audience, not the entire population, and that’s where marketing and social media knowledge are useful.

Although Analytics and Insights offer useful numbers to take to a CEO, having some intelligence behind those numbers is what will help in the long run.